Bangladesh Must Remember Why It Became Bangladesh

There are moments when a country must look beyond its immediate politics and ask a more uncomfortable question: why did we become a country in the first place?

Bangladesh may be approaching such a moment.

The politics of the last couple of years has pushed Bangladesh into an intense reassessment of the Sheikh Hasina era. That reassessment is understandable, but it should not become an erasure of history. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League remain inseparable from one important strand of Bangladesh's political memory: the Liberation War, the secular foundations of the republic and the place of Bengali language and culture in its national identity. This was the very event that had made Bangladesh, the Bangladesh of today. However, this neither places any leader or government beyond scrutiny, nor does it diminish the suffering associated with the violence of 2024. But accountability and historical memory are not mutually exclusive. Bangladesh should be able to examine the failures of a government without dismantling the ideals that preceded it, and to distinguish criticism of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's rule from a rejection of the cultural and political inheritance of 1971, as Bangladesh is older than its present political quarrels, and the meaning of 1971 is larger than the fate of the Awami League.

The country was apparently born from an absolute rejection of the proposition that religion or extreme ideals alone could define a nation.

Pakistan had been created around a Muslim political identity. Yet within a generation, that common religious identity proved insufficient to hold its two wings together. Language mattered. Culture mattered. Political representation mattered. Economic justice mattered. Above all, the Bengali people refused to accept that being good Muslims required them to become culturally less Bengali.

This history matters enormously today.

The tension between Bengali culture and religious homogenisation was not invented retrospectively. Scholarship on the period documents how elements within the Pakistani establishment regarded aspects of Bengali culture with suspicion because they were considered too closely connected to Hindu or Indian traditions. Tagore, Bengali cultural practices and even symbols associated with Bengali life became caught in arguments about what was sufficiently “Islamic.” Bengali cultural assertion consequently acquired a political meaning of its own.

Bangladesh should be very careful not to recreate, in another form, the cultural argument from which it once fought to free itself.

Its own Constitution remembers this history remarkably clearly. Article 9 says Bengalee nationalism derives its identity from its language and culture and connects that identity directly with the struggle that produced an independent Bangladesh. Article 23 asks the state to conserve the country's cultural traditions, language, literature and arts.

That is why the growth of religious exclusivism deserves a conversation that goes beyond party politics.

This is particularly true of Salafi-jihadist and similar ideological currents when they seek to impose a rigid understanding of religious authenticity upon a society whose Islam has developed for centuries within a distinctly Bengali cultural environment. This should not be misunderstood as an argument against Islam, religious observance, or every person who identifies with Salafi theology. Religious conservatism and violent extremism are not synonymous.

The problem begins elsewhere.

It begins when faith becomes a test of cultural purity; when Bengali music, festivals, literature or indigenous practices are treated with suspicion simply because they developed within a shared civilisation; when coexistence becomes theological compromise; and when a neighbour who worships differently slowly becomes an outsider.

If Bangali-prem is real, it cannot depend on whether a Bengali is a Hindu or a Muslim. It is against this larger question of belonging that the recent case of Chinmoy Krishna das Prabhu becomes particularly difficult to ignore. The recent images of Chinmoy Krishna das Prabhu attending his mother’s last rites were deeply painful.

The recent row

After spending a long period in detention, he was given only five hours of parole after his mother died. His family said that she had wanted to see her son one last time while she was alive. That wish was never fulfilled. He could return home only after her death to perform her last rites.

Whatever the legal case against him, it is difficult not to feel the pain of that moment. A son could not see his mother before she died. His Dharma should not have made that intense pain matter any less. It also raises a larger question about whether minorities in Bangladesh feel the same sense of belonging, security and empathy as everyone else.

And that brings us back to the same difficult question for Bangladesh: when the Bengali who suffers happens to be a Hindu, where does the Bangali-prem or the love for Bangla go?

That question is not really about one monk. It is about whether Bangladesh's cultural nationalism still has enough space to embrace all Bengalis.

A Hindu family grieving in Chattogram is not culturally foreign to Bangladesh. A Buddhist living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is not an inconvenient footnote to its identity. A Christian Bangladeshi does not have to prove his patriotism through his religion. Nor should a Muslim Bangladeshi have to abandon Bengali cultural inheritance to demonstrate the authenticity of his faith.

Bangladesh's Constitution itself contains this complexity. Islam is the state religion, while the constitutional order also retains secularism and guarantees equal status and rights in the practice of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and other religions. Under Article 2A of the Constitution, Islam is designated as the state religion. However, the same article mandates that the State must ensure equal status and equal rights in the practice of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and other religions. On the other hand, Article 12 defines secularism partly through eliminating communalism, preventing the political abuse of religion and opposing religious persecution.

 There are moments when a country must look beyond its immediate politics and ask a more uncomfortable question: why did we become a country in the first place?

Bangladesh may be approaching such a moment.

The politics of the last couple of years has pushed Bangladesh into an intense reassessment of the Sheikh Hasina era. That reassessment is understandable, but it should not become an erasure of history. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League remain inseparable from one important strand of Bangladesh's political memory: the Liberation War, the secular foundations of the republic and the place of Bengali language and culture in its national identity. This was the very event that had made Bangladesh, the Bangladesh of today. However, this neither places any leader or government beyond scrutiny, nor does it diminish the suffering associated with the violence of 2024. But accountability and historical memory are not mutually exclusive. Bangladesh should be able to examine the failures of a government without dismantling the ideals that preceded it, and to distinguish criticism of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's rule from a rejection of the cultural and political inheritance of 1971, as Bangladesh is older than its present political quarrels, and the meaning of 1971 is larger than the fate of the Awami League.

The country was apparently born from an absolute rejection of the proposition that religion or extreme ideals alone could define a nation.

Pakistan had been created around a Muslim political identity. Yet within a generation, that common religious identity proved insufficient to hold its two wings together. Language mattered. Culture mattered. Political representation mattered. Economic justice mattered. Above all, the Bengali people refused to accept that being good Muslims required them to become culturally less Bengali.

This history matters enormously today.

The tension between Bengali culture and religious homogenisation was not invented retrospectively. Scholarship on the period documents how elements within the Pakistani establishment regarded aspects of Bengali culture with suspicion because they were considered too closely connected to Hindu or Indian traditions. Tagore, Bengali cultural practices and even symbols associated with Bengali life became caught in arguments about what was sufficiently “Islamic.” Bengali cultural assertion consequently acquired a political meaning of its own.

Bangladesh should be very careful not to recreate, in another form, the cultural argument from which it once fought to free itself.

Its own Constitution remembers this history remarkably clearly. Article 9 says Bengalee nationalism derives its identity from its language and culture and connects that identity directly with the struggle that produced an independent Bangladesh. Article 23 asks the state to conserve the country's cultural traditions, language, literature and arts.

That is why the growth of religious exclusivism deserves a conversation that goes beyond party politics.

This is particularly true of Salafi-jihadist and similar ideological currents when they seek to impose a rigid understanding of religious authenticity upon a society whose Islam has developed for centuries within a distinctly Bengali cultural environment. This should not be misunderstood as an argument against Islam, religious observance, or every person who identifies with Salafi theology. Religious conservatism and violent extremism are not synonymous.

The problem begins elsewhere.

It begins when faith becomes a test of cultural purity; when Bengali music, festivals, literature or indigenous practices are treated with suspicion simply because they developed within a shared civilisation; when coexistence becomes theological compromise; and when a neighbour who worships differently slowly becomes an outsider.

If Bangali-prem is real, it cannot depend on whether a Bengali is a Hindu or a Muslim. It is against this larger question of belonging that the recent case of Chinmoy Krishna das Prabhu becomes particularly difficult to ignore. The recent images of Chinmoy Krishna das Prabhu attending his mother’s last rites were deeply painful.

The recent row

After spending a long period in detention, he was given only five hours of parole after his mother died. His family said that she had wanted to see her son one last time while she was alive. That wish was never fulfilled. He could return home only after her death to perform her last rites.

Whatever the legal case against him, it is difficult not to feel the pain of that moment. A son could not see his mother before she died. His Dharma should not have made that intense pain matter any less. It also raises a larger question about whether minorities in Bangladesh feel the same sense of belonging, security and empathy as everyone else.

And that brings us back to the same difficult question for Bangladesh: when the Bengali who suffers happens to be a Hindu, where does the Bangali-prem or the love for Bangla go?

That question is not really about one monk. It is about whether Bangladesh's cultural nationalism still has enough space to embrace all Bengalis.

A Hindu family grieving in Chattogram is not culturally foreign to Bangladesh. A Buddhist living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is not an inconvenient footnote to its identity. A Christian Bangladeshi does not have to prove his patriotism through his religion. Nor should a Muslim Bangladeshi have to abandon Bengali cultural inheritance to demonstrate the authenticity of his faith.

Bangladesh's Constitution itself contains this complexity. Islam is the state religion, while the constitutional order also retains secularism and guarantees equal status and rights in the practice of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and other religions. Under Article 2A of the Constitution, Islam is designated as the state religion. However, the same article mandates that the State must ensure equal status and equal rights in the practice of the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and other religions. On the other hand, Article 12 defines secularism partly through eliminating communalism, preventing the political abuse of religion and opposing religious persecution.              

There is therefore no need to manufacture a choice between Islam and Bengal.

Bangladesh can be effectively Muslim and culturally Bengali. Indeed, that synthesis may be one of its greatest strengths.

What it must resist is the idea that greater religiosity requires less cultural pluralism.

That matters beyond Bangladesh too. Religious radicalisation does not respect borders. Neither does communal anger. A temple attack in Bangladesh can become a political issue in India within hours. Anti-Hindu violence can feed anti-Muslim mobilisation elsewhere, which can then return through social media to Bangladesh in an escalating cycle of grievance. What begins as domestic intolerance can quickly become regional insecurity.

Moving away from Salafi-jihadist and other exclusionary currents is therefore not merely about protecting Bangladesh's minorities. It is part of protecting peace in a deeply interconnected South Asia.

And Bangladesh has something unusually valuable to contribute here.

It is a Muslim-majority country whose birth demonstrated the limits of constructing nationality through religion alone. Scholarship has described the emergence of Bangladesh as distinctive precisely because a shared Bengali linguistic identity crossed the Hindu-Muslim divide.

That history should be Bangladesh's confidence, not its embarrassment.

A new generation does not have to inherit every political interpretation of 1971. It should question leaders, parties and official histories. But questioning history is different from forgetting its central lesson.

Bangladesh became possible because Bengalis insisted that their language, culture, dignity and political identity could not simply disappear inside a larger religious nationalism.

More than five decades later, perhaps the greatest tribute to the Liberation War is therefore neither a slogan nor loyalty to a particular party.

It is ensuring that nobody has to become less Bengali in order to belong to Bangladesh.

And whenever religious or political extremism begins dividing its people again, Bangladesh should remember the question written into the very circumstances of its birth: If Bengali culture, pluralism and the equal belonging of its people are gradually surrendered, what exactly was Bangladesh liberated to preserve?There is therefore no need to manufacture a choice between Islam and Bengal.

Bangladesh can be effectively Muslim and culturally Bengali. Indeed, that synthesis may be one of its greatest strengths.

What it must resist is the idea that greater religiosity requires less cultural pluralism.

That matters beyond Bangladesh too. Religious radicalisation does not respect borders. Neither does communal anger. A temple attack in Bangladesh can become a political issue in India within hours. Anti-Hindu violence can feed anti-Muslim mobilisation elsewhere, which can then return through social media to Bangladesh in an escalating cycle of grievance. What begins as domestic intolerance can quickly become regional insecurity.

Moving away from Salafi-jihadist and other exclusionary currents is therefore not merely about protecting Bangladesh's minorities. It is part of protecting peace in a deeply interconnected South Asia.

And Bangladesh has something unusually valuable to contribute here.

It is a Muslim-majority country whose birth demonstrated the limits of constructing nationality through religion alone. Scholarship has described the emergence of Bangladesh as distinctive precisely because a shared Bengali linguistic identity crossed the Hindu-Muslim divide.

That history should be Bangladesh's confidence, not its embarrassment.

A new generation does not have to inherit every political interpretation of 1971. It should question leaders, parties and official histories. But questioning history is different from forgetting its central lesson.

Bangladesh became possible because Bengalis insisted that their language, culture, dignity and political identity could not simply disappear inside a larger religious nationalism.

More than five decades later, perhaps the greatest tribute to the Liberation War is therefore neither a slogan nor loyalty to a particular party.

It is ensuring that nobody has to become less Bengali in order to belong to Bangladesh.

And whenever religious or political extremism begins dividing its people again, Bangladesh should remember the question written into the very circumstances of its birth: If Bengali culture, pluralism and the equal belonging of its people are gradually surrendered, what exactly was Bangladesh liberated to preserve?